Freelance Writer

GPSMyCity: Self-guided walking tours on your phone

Before I plan any trip, I usually indulge in a period of research. I read travel blogs, surf travel websites, search Facebook travel groups for advice and basically prep as much as I can so our trip is well planned. That doesn’t mean we never veer off of my tentative itinerary once we’re on the ground in a new place, but I like knowing we have a plan so we won’t miss something really special.

Recently, I was contacted about my own blog by a staffer for GPSMyCity, a travel app for both IOS and Android phone users. GPSMyCity works with bloggers from around the world to create self-guided city walks in more than 700 cities. (And yes, Tokyo is one of those cities.) When you download the free app, you get access to more than 5,000 articles featuring city walks. It’s a great resource for those of us who love to travel. Type in a city name and, voila, a list of articles featuring outings in that city appears on screen. You can then click and read as many of those articles as you want.

That’s super for research ahead of time, but the app also allows users to interact with the articles offline. That means when you’re travelling and don’t have wifi or cellular data on your phone, you can still read saved articles. It’s pretty easy to set up: Just click ‘Save” at the bottom of a story, and it shows up in a Downloads folder, readable whenever you want.

All well and good, but what if you’re someone like me who tends to get lost easily? For $1.99, you can upgrade any article you like into a GPS-guided travel article. (Only for IOS, though.) That’s a fancy way of saying that you can click on any of the sites mentioned in the story and it opens an offline city map and GPS navigation system. That means when you’re in the city, you can get a route to the places mentioned in the article. There are also a few city-wide bundled-article options for $4.99.

I’ve agreed to let GPSMyCity publish some of my blog posts. If you’re intrigued by the concept, like I was, you can try out –for free–one of my article apps in its upgraded GPS-enabled form for a limited time: Monday, Oct. 24 until Sunday, Oct.30.

You can access a GPS-guided travel article in one of two ways:

Download the GPSMyCity master app on your phone, or

Click on the article link below and choose upgrade to get the (free) GPS-guided version